0.cached.png
By Newsweek Editors
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Autumn at last, and as the days grow short and the dry leaves rustle underfoot, alert cookbook writers everywhere sense the nip of nostalgia in the air. Time to pull out those recipes for long-simmering stews, fill the kitchen with the scent of baking cookies, then switch on the word processor and turn it all into dear old cash. This year the stack of my-favorite cornbread-stuffing cookbooks is higher than ever, possibly as a corrective to more esoteric trends of recent seasons. How many recipes for low-cholesterol Thai versions of raspberry creme brulee can one family use? So bookstores are packed with titles trumpeting old-fashioned cookery, some written from the heart and others from the dictionary of generic sentiment. "Sometimes we forget, but when all is said and done, it is love that we all want most," declares Rose Levy Beranbaum in her introduction to Rose's Christmas Cookies (255 pages. Morrow. $19.95). "It is the best, most exalting emotion we know.... It redeems us and transports us. It is reflected in the resilience of the human spirit." This makes a fairly dramatic rationale for a batch of cashew puffies; but then, it takes more than sugar and vanilla to sell a cookbook these days.
Apart from the occasional sermon, these books offer a welcome new direction for home cooks: home cooking. Many of the recipes are uncomplicated, the ingredients readily available and the results hearty and satisfying. Best of all, nostalgia demands dessert. There is no way to round out a dinner of meat loaf and mashed potatoes with a sliver of perfectly ripened cheese and a fresh fig, no matter how refined your culinary sensibility may be. These meals call for apple crisp and ginger-bread and icebox cookies and that lemon cake that turns into a pudding on the bottom. And it's about time.
Marion Cunningham puts all these desserts and many other homey pleasures into her new revision of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (874 pages. Knopf. $24.95), the best edition of this longtime classic since Fannie's 1896 original. "What I hope to do is lure you into the kitchen and show you how easy it is to make a simple meal," she writes; and under her guidance just about anybody can become what used to be called, without dishonor, a good plain cook. Cunningham includes all the basics, from chicken a la king to peanut-butter fudge, and lots of imaginative extras. Her spinach salad with chutney dressing is zesty and unusual, and her war cake--no eggs, milk or white sugar, and very little fat--is rich and flavorful. Her lack of affection for the microwave oven is plain--"I don't think using a microwave oven encourages people to enjoy cooking," she writes--and she may be the only serious student of that appliance to point out that it doesn't blend flavors successfully. Because she sees its shortcomings so well, the recipes she has developed in deference to its popularity work beautifully. Of all the big, basic cookbooks on the market this season, Cunningham's is the easiest to use, the most reliable and the one likeliest to become a friend for life.
Read More on News
The team of home economists who produced Betty Crocker's Old. Fashioned Cookbook (245 pages. Prentice Hall. $17.95) have come up with a fascinating historical document, possibly by accident. More so than many a scholarly work, this book captures the peculiar history of American cooking, ricocheting as it does from the blunt to the bizarre and back again. Nothing could be simpler than Betty Crocker's pot roast, and nothing weirder than her luncheon rice salad (crushed pineapple, coconut, raisins and rice, mixed with whipped cream and served on lettuce). Here, too, are bygone versions of dishes later made famous by processed foods. That ubiquitous green bean casserole made with canned beans, canned soup and canned onion rings, for example, apparently originated as a casserole of fresh beans and sour cream topped with bread crumbs. It's horrible either way. And while the book notes that magic balloon buns were an "original Betty Crocker recipe," the truth is that these sweetened yeast rolls wrapped around sweetened marshmallows are popular today because of Betty's rival, the Pillsbury Doughboy. An instant version using ready-made dough won Grand Prize in the 1969 Pillsbury Bake-Off. Historical ironies of this sort make up most of the appeal of this book livelier recipes for what the authors call "heritage cookery" can be found elsewhere.
Books about home cooking, like home cooking itself, tend to be highly personal. Normally this is a desirable trait in a cookbook, but it's one that has to be handled with restraint; coziness turns into a deadly weapon fast. John Pinderhughes takes a big chance with his Family of the Spirit Cook book (320 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24.95), but in the end he triumphs. More than a cookbook, this is an affectionate album of portraits from African-American kitchens. Pinderhughes gathered recipes and memories from his friends and family and then allowed both the food and the personalities to speak for themselves. The result is an unforced intimacy ("I made jelly. Deed I did. I made so much jelly, I turned to jelly," says his grandmother) that's rare in any cookbook. Some of the recipes will have limited appeal, for example the one where you start by cleaning 20 pounds of chitlins ("Doe ... loved chitlins," recalls Gram T. "He'd bring those damn things home and I'd have to clean them and fix them up for him. But he loved them, so I'd do 'em"). Others deserve a place in every family's recipe file: Gum Gum's sweet potato and orange casserole is one of the best things that ever happened to the oftabused sweet potato.
You can't get much more personal than Leah Loeb Fischer, whose Mama Leah's Jewish Kitchen (with Maria Polushkin Robbins. 266 pages. Macmillan. $19.95) offers cooking so homey it barely belongs in print "My mother's idea of gourmet was someone who was a picky eater," writes Fischer, who runs several takeout food shops in the New York area. Unabashedly, she puts canned tomato soup in the meat loaf, ketchup in the pot roast and schmaltz in the chopped eggs. ("Sure you can substitute corn oil for the rendered chicken fat, but who are you kidding?" she writes. "With 12 eggs, you may as well go ahead and enjoy the great taste of schmalt.") Her chicken and meatball fricassee, which she says is the most popular dish she makes, is heavy with memories as well as flavor, a real Jewish madeleine.
But when the subject is cookies, for some reason, cozy seems to run amok. Lisa Yockelson's Country Cookies (144 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50) will either win your heart or send you screaming from the room, depending on your tolerance for gingham, Depression glass and miniature baskets lined with moss. "I love to set out a coffee or tea service with sweets on a well-worn pine table in my library," writes Yockelson. "(The library is a cozy place--where a jumble of books and lots of porcelain collected over the years fills all the nooks.)" Even the punctuation is coy. And the cookies aren't worth the agony of reading the prose, at least if her bittersweet chocolate-caramel bars are representative. They're easy to make, but the too rich, too-sweet layers harmonize poorly; the whole thing seems egregious. Beranbaum's book is also a disappointment, especially coming from the author of "The Cake Bible," a best seller. Overwritten and overdesigned, "Rose's Christmas Cookies" puts a lot of glossy paper to the service of such undistinguished recipes as her cinnamon cloud-nine crunchies--an elaborate name for a dry and boring few bites. More glossy paper goes to tips like "Avoid crowding the cookies into one section of the cookie sheet"--advice she repeats after nearly every recipe, just in case you normally bake cookies with all of them piled at one end of the cookie sheet.
If all you want is a kitchen full of good smells and good cookies, if you know perfectly well you're going to stick them in a battered old tin with a faded Santa on the lid, then pick up The Christmas Cookie Book, by Judy Knipe and Barbara Marks (132 pages. Fawcett. $14.95). No frills, no silly writing, just clear, precise directions for such treats as lace cookies and chocolate-nut kisses. Eaten in the right spirit, they'll last a lifetime.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines